Jen Koch, 2008. Digital

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Digital painting is both similar to traditional painting, and also extremely different. My technique employs the use of a pen tablet (a Wacom Bamboo, for this piece) and Adobe Photoshop. I want to create digital artwork that still has a ‘painterly’ feel, with visible brush strokes. I feel like I accomplished exactly what I wanted in this piece.

The construction of this piece was made using one of the benefits of digital painting that traditional painting doesn’t offer in quite the same way. I created Blue Eyes in grayscale first, developing the play of light and shadow in its simplest form. After that, I used Photoshop’s functionality to overlay colors in a very controlled way. This doesn’t always work and can leave pieces feeling very flat and ‘contrasty,’ but in this case it worked very well.